Part 20

On the afternoon of the wedding the temptation was not to be overcome. For a long time she fought it and at last, putting on a large hat and a veil she descended from the Babylon Arms and made her way by tram car to the neighborhood of St. Bart’s. Before the church there was a great crowd (a fact for which she was doubtless thankful) which pressed close against the awnings and peered at the carriages that were beginning already to arrive. There was, she felt, something at once comic and pitiful in the spectacle of men and women crowding and pushing into the gutters for a glimpse of the fashionable people who descended and swept across the red carpet into the church. Among the arrivals there were dowagers who strained through the doors of tiny cabriolets, cow-eyed young girls, elderly bachelors dressed with the stiffness of starch, whole armies of relatives and friends, moving forward with a concentrated air of indifference to the stares, jostled fairly by men with cameras who climbed about on the steps and even as high as the façade of the church in order to capture brief glimpses of such people as the Apostle to the Genteel, Mrs. Champion and her Virgins, the questionable Mrs. Sigourney (who was always news), and the dewlapped Mrs. Mallinson.

With the arrival of the bridegroom’s mother the jam became terrifying. Women fought with one another to catch a glimpse of a fat little woman clad in purple satin with a bird’s nest on which a few violets had been carelessly planted, perched high on her head. Ellen, taller than most of the crowd, was able to see without being seen. She caught a swift glimpse of Thérèse as she emerged from the door of the cabriolet, only to see her swallowed up at once in the press of the onlookers. She appeared calm and had the air of a woman well satisfied. After all, she had succeeded in uniting two great fortunes. The bride was all that she should have been. The future was assured.

Of Richard Callendar himself, Ellen caught only a swift glimpse--a flash, no more, of a dark handsome face paler than she had ever seen it. A moment later the bride arrived, but of Sabine nothing was visible; her face was covered by a long veil of lace. The mob of democratic citizens rocked and quarreled and pushed; dowdy women from the suburbs elbowed their way through stenographers and errand girls; clerks and fat old men trod on the toes of angry females; and Sabine was swallowed up.

Ellen leaned against the stone of the church as if she had become suddenly faint. Here the sounds of the music came to her, distant and triumphant, now swelling, now diminishing, until at length it died away altogether to make silence for the ceremony.

* * * * *

It was not until the bridal party, still jostled by the crowd, came out of the church and descended the steps that she saw them fully. Standing now on a jutting piece of stone she saw Callendar and Sabine move toward the waiting carriage. They smiled as if that were what the world expected of them and once Ellen fancied that the bridegroom looked toward her. Of this she was not certain and she was sure that he could not have recognized her through the veil, but she slipped from her eminence and dropped to the sidewalk where she vanished in the pressing mob. Nevertheless she was suddenly happy and strong, for in the one swift glimpse of the two faces she had divined her victory. The face of Callendar, for all its fixed smile, was pale and a little drawn, and in the eyes of the bride there was a bright fixed look of unhappiness. Sabine, so intelligent, so grotesquely clever, must have known what Ellen knew--that although she had married Callendar she was not the one who possessed him. In the end she might perhaps lose her game of patience because, after all, it was not a simple game; there were in it elements beyond the control even of so shrewd a pair as herself and Thérèse Callendar.

* * * * *

All the way back to the Babylon Arms, Ellen hurried with an hysterical air of triumph. It may have been that she knew a profound feminine satisfaction in the sense of vanity gratified. She hurried too because Clarence would be waiting for her, tired and pathetic and hungry. It would please him to find her so happy, so excited. In this strange confusion of moods she passed between the lions of the Babylon Arms and made her way up to the tiny flat. She was neither happy nor unhappy; it was emotion beyond either thing, entangled somehow with the old sense of triumph.

The dark hallway with the red walls was the same; the red carpeted stairway, its splendor gone now and the cordage showing through, was unchanged, as it had always been. It was only when she ascended the very last step that she discovered anything unusual. The door of the apartment stood open a little way so that she was able to look through the room into the distant stretches that lay beyond the river. For an instant she halted, looking about her. The key was in the lock. On the smoking table there lay the remnants of the cigar which Clarence always smoked on his way home from the office. His coat and waistcoat, which he was accustomed to hang neatly in the closet, lay on the divan. They had been thrown down carelessly. The red sunset above the river illuminated the shabby room in a fiery glow.

Standing quite still in the center of the floor she waited, listening for some familiar sound; and presently when there was no interruption of the stillness, she called “Clarence! Clarence!” in a voice that sounded queer and strange to her. The excitement had gone from her now, drained away by a curious sense of foreboding. In that narrow life where every day each small act followed exactly the same plan, the sight of a coat flung down carelessly terrified her.

She called again presently and, receiving no answer, she opened the door of their bedroom. It was empty. The room in which Fergus slept was likewise undisturbed. In the kitchen there was no one. Then slowly she made her way to the door of the bath-room. It stood open a little way as if inviting her, maliciously; yet it was not open wide enough for her to see what lay beyond. Gently she pushed it back until it struck some object that blocked its motion. Again she pushed, this time more firmly, and the obstacle gave way, moving a little to one side so that a foot became visible. It was then in a single, unreal moment, that she divined what had happened. She pushed harder and the door flew back. Behind it on the rug where he had done his exercises so patiently lay Clarence, face down, motionless. He had fallen forward and from beneath him there flowed a thin, dark stream. It had touched the white of his shirt and discolored it.

There was no doubt that he was dead. There was no doubt as to how he had died. The pistol, which had always been in the drawer of the bedroom table, lay beside him on the white floor. In the gathering darkness she knelt down at his side and began to weep, wildly, hysterically, like a savage. The darkness and the silence engulfed her.

It was thus that Fergus found her when he came in at last.

* * * * *

A doctor came and after him a policeman, but there was nothing to be done. The man was dead, and, as they observed to Fergus, you could see how he came to die. There would have to be the nasty business of an inquest. The news filtered through the apartment and the elevator man and the defunct actress with the white poodle in her arms came and stood at the doorway, whispering together and offering sympathy. It was Fergus who, with all the efficiency of Hattie Tolliver herself, “took hold” and managed things.

As for Ellen, she shut herself away, with a knowledge that roused in her a new agony infinitely more profound and terrible than the first brief outburst. In the darkness of her room she lay, alone now, on one of the apple green beds, silent and quite beyond so paltry a manifestation as tears. In one hand she held a note, crumpled and damp, which had been read again and again.

It was brief although the dead man, in his agitation, had written some things over and over again. It was simple, humble, inarticulate, more real, more vivid than he had ever been in all his mild existence. It was as if all the mysterious substance that was his soul had been poured out in that last moment upon the crumpled bit of paper. He had written it in a great speed; it seemed that, under the stress of fate, he had suddenly gone mad, flamed for an instant into a pitiful kind of heroism and then gone out forever. He had been almost poetic.

“Forgive me, beloved, for what I am doing. It was all that remained. It is better ... everything is better now, and you will be free again as you once were.

“I must tell you what you will soon learn. No one can keep it from you. I am a thief. I have stolen money and now there is no way to escape. If I ran away, it would be the same as what I am doing.... It would be the end. I would never dare ask to see you again. I would never tell you where I had gone. What I am doing is the only way out.”

(Here he had, in his agitation, written the same sentence twice as if he begged her not to hate him because he had been the cause of so much trouble. He had almost said, “Forgive me for being a bother to you.”)

Then it continued, “It was wrong from the beginning. I should never have asked you to run away with me, because I was not good enough. I tried to be and failed. I was a poor thing. So now, after I am gone again, there will be nothing to hold you ... not even from the man you really loved ... if it is not too late. You see, I know the truth! I know the truth! I discovered it in time. Forgive me, dearest. I love you always.”

* * * * *

Slowly during the long hours of the interminable night, the whole tragedy assumed a clarity of form. While she lay on the green bed, in a silence penetrated only by the faint nocturnal sounds that rose from the distant street, the little pieces fitted together ... bits of the past and the present, sudden stabbing memories and poignant flashes of intuition, odd scraps of old emotions vanished now forever ... the little pieces fitted together until, like a picture puzzle, they assumed a swift and startling completeness. She saw the answer in a quick bright flash; it was that she had destroyed him; she it was who had driven him into the abyss. The bitterness lay in the fact that all the while she had tried to save him, to make him happy.

If he had stolen money it could have been for one purpose alone--to give her more than he had been able to give her, to make her believe that he was far greater than he could ever have been. She understood that he had fought for her sake to create an illusion of grandeur, to raise before her eyes the figure of a man, successful and clever, who was not Clarence at all but a creature who existed only in the troubled flights of his ambition. And it was this very figure which, toppling from its pedestal, had destroyed him. She had known all along that there was no such creature. She could have told him....

His humbleness pained her. Even in the end he had chosen to destroy himself in a corner where it would make the least trouble.

There was, too, the vague confused affair of Callendar. The note said so little; it left the fear so incomplete. _There will be nothing to hold you, not even from the man whom you really loved._ He must have known that he had not freed her, even by his death, for he knew that in almost the same hour Callendar had himself ceased to be free. All that was gone now, lost forever, and a little time before it had been so near, quite within her grasp. In trying to have everything she had lost all save her soul and the fire which burned there.... _If it is not too late_....

But the thing which hurt her most was the memory of two words which he had used. They were, strangely enough, words of endearment, of affection, even perhaps of something so strong as passion. He had dared in his note to say “dearest” and “beloved.” He was gone now; he would not have to face her, knowing that because his love had fallen upon barren ground he was ridiculous. In life these were two words which he had never dared to use. They burned now like scars that would never heal.

She could not talk to him now; she could no longer still his uneasiness with empty words and a kiss which cost her nothing. He lay near her, just beyond her door, upon the shabby divan, but she could not reach him. To the dead there was nothing she could say, nothing which she could explain. In death he had come to possess her, for it was she who was humbled now.

* * * * *

She did not hide herself away. When morning came she appeared, calm and cold, to aid a strangely subdued Fergus in all the bitter tasks of caring for the dead. She arranged the telegrams and even chose the wording for the one that went to his sister in Ogdensburg. In all of them she said merely that Clarence had died suddenly. The truth she withheld. (There was always his weak heart to lend credence to such a tale.) In the newspapers there appeared only a brief line or two recording the fact of one more suicide in a great city and this, of course, was never read in the Town or by the people who had known Clarence as a boy. So in the end, his mother was the only one who knew the truth and even of the truth there was a portion which she never learned; it was that her son was a thief.

Out of all the tragic confusion only one thing remained to puzzle her; it was how Clarence had come to know of Richard Callendar. The answer, never entirely clear, came to her from a source she had never considered, from a man whom she treated, when she bothered to think of him at all, as beneath her contempt.

In the midst of that first gray morning the door opened and Mr. Wyck came in, shabby and downcast, to pay his condolences. He returned to the flat where he had known the only happiness which had ever come his way, but he returned, clearly, under circumstances he had never foreseen in the most gloomy and portentous of his bitter imaginings. At the sight of Ellen, cold and capable, in the midst of her grief (for she did grieve in a fashion she would not have done for a man whom she had loved), his green eyes turned toward the tips of his boots and he murmured, “Ah, this is terrible ... terrible,” in the professional manner of an undertaker.

In his heart, he may have thought, “It was you who ruined him, you, who came here into this very flat, a nobody, to use him for what he was worth ... to turn me out into the streets.” But he kept silent, perhaps because she had always terrified him, filling him with a sense of one standing upon the rim of a volcano. He was afraid of scenes, Mr. Wyck, and so his hate found its way into the open through devious, hidden channels. He had not the courage, it seemed, even to look at her now.

They stood for a time in silence by the divan, symbols of that queer, distorted figure of which the dead Clarence formed the third angle--a figure all awry, perverted out of all drawing--Clarence, so white and still, gone now beyond the reach of either of them.

Mr. Wyck muttered oily and incoherent consolations.... “It is a bitter blow.... One must be brave.... He was a good man....” All the old banalities which somehow took on a bitter, ironical ring. And presently he snuffled and wiped his eyes, as much in pity for himself who had lost the one thing for which he had gambled, as for the man who lay quiet and still upon the divan.

Ellen, watching him, was filled with a slow, burning anger. She wanted suddenly to crush him as she had once wanted to crush poor May Seton, because he was sentimental, and silly and without strength. And suddenly it occurred to her to say abruptly, “It was not a case of suicide. It was not Clarence who killed himself.... It was others who killed him.”

She had spoken in a sudden moment of humility, acknowledging her own guilt, and the speech, so abrupt, so unexpected, produced upon Mr. Wyck the strangest effect. He looked at her sharply, for the first time, and then averted his eyes; but in the brief glance she discovered the answer to the mystery. It was Mr. Wyck who had betrayed her secret. It was Mr. Wyck who had told the story of Callendar, distended no doubt, and perverted by his malice. She knew it by the look of terror in the shifty eyes. He had used this secret as his last stake.... And he had lost, forever, beyond all hope.

Almost at once he turned away from the morbid fascination of the divan, bade her good-by and hurried out of the door; and Ellen, watching his narrow back with the weak, sloping shoulders, knew that she would never see him again. She was sure now that it was this poor, furtive creature, with his strange, perverted love, who had given the dead man his final push over the abyss into eternity. For even the theft would not have driven Clarence from her; it could have been only the knowledge that she was lost to him forever.

So it was a man whom she had scorned, a creature whom she ignored and who hated her, who in his poor fumbling way had set her free.

36

She went to his own town for the funeral and there met for the first time his mother, a grim, tragic sort of woman with sharp, searching eyes and straight black hair pulled into a tight knot at the back of her neck. It was this woman with whom she shared the secret; none of the others knew, not even his sister (the one he had said played the piano), a mild, weary woman rather like Clarence, who was the mother of five children and went about throughout the visit weak and red-eyed with weeping. The neighbors flocked into the house, mostly middle-aged women and spinsters, black and crow-like, moving about in melancholy clusters with the air of vultures. They came and went, speaking always in whispers, saying the same things, wearing the same mournful countenances, talking always of their own losses and calamities, speculating always upon the deaths of certain well-established invalids in the community. Always they reached in time the same refrain. It was this--“If he’d been an old man it would have been different, but he was so young and so clever. He was such a brilliant fellow and doing so well in the city. He’d have been a big man some day. We were all proud of him here in Ogdensburg.”

And Ellen, handsome and pale in her mourning, sat by quietly, listening while they surveyed her with a distant air of disapproval. She kept silent. Perhaps to these crow-like women, Clarence had been a brilliant and powerful figure.

* * * * *

In the Babylon Arms there was little to be done. Ellen paid a visit for the first time to the offices of the Superba Electrical Company and there learned that Clarence had stolen money which he collected and failed to deliver. The amount was something over fifteen hundred dollars. When she heard it she murmured, “It was so little too! Why, I could have paid it if he had told me. To have killed himself for so little!”

But she knew, of course, that if he had confessed he would have destroyed that splendid creature which he fancied he had created in her eyes. He had preferred himself to be destroyed. In death it would not matter that she discovered the fraud: he would not have to face her.

She paid the money, out of her savings and out of the amount brought by the sale of the furniture. She sold even the piano he had bought her as a wedding gift. And when she had finished there remained but little more than a hundred dollars.

On the very day the furniture was being taken from the flat she told Fergus the whole truth concerning her plans. They sat together amid the wreckage, brother and sister, both understanding for perhaps the first time that they were faced by the new problem of Hattie Tolliver. Both knew that she had set her mind upon coming to them, and having tasted freedom, neither was willing now to turn back.

“There is Ma,” said Ellen. “I don’t know what’s to be done about her. She’ll be coming here to live before long and I won’t be here. She’s worked all these years to come where she can be near us and now I’ve got to go away. I’m going to Paris.... It’s the only thing left.”

Fergus looked at her. “But you don’t know French,” he said, “and you haven’t any money.”

“I can’t turn back now. If I went back to Ma, it would be the end of me. I know that. I couldn’t.... I couldn’t ever begin again. I’ve enough money to take me there.... I’ll manage after that.... Besides, there is Lily.... She promised to help me when the time came.... The time has come.... I can’t turn back.”

Fergus listened in silence, moved perhaps by the new dignity that had come to her, a dignity touched with bitterness. She was beautiful too in a new fashion, more placid, more serene.

“You must be good to Ma,” she continued. “She’ll hate my running away, but I’ve got to go. She’s a wonderful woman. She’s the one who has sacrificed everything. She’s always done it ... for all of us. I couldn’t go if I didn’t know that you’re the one she loves best of all. You’re the one she worships. She loved you enough to let you go. I had to run away. You know it, Fergus, as well as I. You must be good to her. If anything happened to you, it would kill her. You mustn’t disappoint her. One day we must all make her proud of us. I mean to do it, and then when I’m rich, when I’m successful, I can reward her.” She paused for a moment and then added. “You see, she loves you best because you’re so like Pa. You’re the way he used to be when she fell in love with him.”

The boy’s face took on an unaccustomed gravity. He rose and looked out of the window over the beloved and magical city. “I’ll do my best,” he said presently. “I’ll do my best.... She’s a wonderful woman.” (Yet neither of them would turn back now.)

In the room there was no sound for a long time save the ticking of the clock, wrapped now in paper to be carted away. At last he turned and said, “But you’re going to Lily.... Ma will hate that.”

“I know she will.... She’s always been afraid of Lily. She needn’t worry though. I can take care of myself. I imagine nothing very serious can ever happen to me again.”

It was Lily again, always Lily who was concerned in the whole course of Ellen’s destiny. Yet Ellen never knew how great a part she had played for she never knew, of course, that if chance had not thrown her glamorous cousin into the path of Clarence on a wintry night years before, he might have been alive and happy now, the husband of a stupid woman who would have thought him as wonderful as the figure he had given his life to create. He had looked for an instant at the sun and been blinded.

So perhaps, in the end, Skinflint Seton had been right. _Women like that can ruin men ... just by talking to them._

37

The world of Lily had its center in a house which stood in that part of Paris beyond the Trocadero in the direction of Auteuil and the Bois. Here she had lived for years, since the moment when she had found it agreeably necessary to live abroad. For her purposes the house possessed every advantage; it resembled, after a curious fashion, those convents of the eighteenth century to which ladies of fashion retired at the moments when they desired solitude and rest and yet wished not to be cut off entirely from the gaiety of the world. As the Baron had once observed, Lily herself belonged to the eighteenth century; there was about her always so much of luxury and indolence, so much of charm and unmorality.